Defining “reality” in this dynamic universe

The universe is a 24/7phenomenon, yet this reality doesn’t inform worldviews. 

Recall George, Fr. George Gorospe: “No human formulation of reality, no philosophical explanation of human experience can say: ‘I have grasped the whole of ‘reality’ and crystallized it in an expression or system that exhausts all its meaning. Reality is too rich and is continuously changing; it can’t fall under a set of categories.

“Hence, there is need today of a more dynamic and more existential philosophy inspired by the Neo-Thomist revival of the authentic thought of St. Thomas, i.e., it is not a ‘closed system’ but remains ‘open’ to the valid insights of other philosophies. For example, to the contribution of contemporary phenomenology and existentialism.” [Christian Renewal of Filipino Values, Vitaliano R. Gorospe; Philippine Studies vol. 14, no. 2, 1966; Ateneo de Manila University]

Whether it’s Cha-Cha in the Philippines or the GOP’s future – post-Trump – if not the US, worldviews are held by individuals without the consciousness of the “reality” of this universe.

Recall the two operating systems in the brain from Behavioral Economics – System 1 (automatic) and System 2 (conscious) – and we will appreciate why America, if not the world, is polarized.

Even the Catholic Church has a conservative and a progressive wing. That is despite Christ walking the face of the earth to denounce binary thinking – as in dualism, best exemplified by his battles with the scribes and Pharisees. And his Two Great Commandments.

“The shameful participation of Catholic leaders in Trump’s attempt to steal the election,” The Editors, America Magazine: The Jesuit Review, 12th Jan 2021.

“To make matters worse, some of those involved are claiming the warrant of the Gospel. That praying for attempts to disenfranchise the populations of entire states to succeed and pretending that they are doing God’s will in supporting Mr. Trump’s assault on the integrity of American elections.

“They have convinced themselves of the truth of Mr. Trump’s fabrications about the election being ‘stolen’ from him. That does not reduce their culpability; it underlines their devotion to Mr. Trump; and drew them away from the facts and the truth.

“The riches of the Gospel are being diverted into one of Mr. Trump’s bankruptcies.

“The danger in such an idolatrous use of the Gospel for nakedly partisan ends is not primarily that it will succeed in overturning the US election. At least at this juncture, the guardrails of the American republic seem to be holding.

“The danger, instead, is that the association of Christian faith with the corrupt project of installing Mr. Trump in a second term by any means necessary undermines the credibility of the whole church’s efforts to evangelize.

“While drafting this editorial, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Tex., is scheduled to speak by video at a rally after a march on Saturday in Washington, DC, dedicated to ‘praying for the walls of corruption and election fraud to fall.’

“Several other Catholic figures are scheduled to appear as well. Bishop Strickland’s choice to lend episcopal support to this effort brings disrepute upon his office. We hope and pray that his brother bishops may exercise a ministry of fraternal correction by publicly clarifying for the faithful that the American bishops as a whole have not taken sides against the will of the voters in our democracy.”

Let’s bring it closer to home: “Trying to understand Filipino-American Catholics who voted for Trump,” Christian Seno, Rappler.com, 8th Jan 2021; Seno is a former Franciscan friar who left religious life after writing about racism in faith communities following the 2016 US presidential election.

“How could Filipino-Americans continue to express support for an administration that has demonized immigrants, flouted the advice of the scientific and medical communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and actively undermined American democracy through voter suppression and dismantling the United States Postal Service? I am exceedingly perplexed to find some of these Trump supporters in my own family, a family of faithful Roman Catholics, immigrants (both documented and undocumented), nurses, and postal workers.

“It's been tough to pinpoint exactly why some Filipino-American Catholics, including my parents, support Donald Trump. Political conversations in the United States have grown increasingly polarized. I am often guilty of being unable to hear, much less understand why Trump supporters feel as they do. And yet, when I have tried to enter into conversations with family members who support Trump, I am often met with nothing more than talking points parroted from Fox News or other conservative media outlets.

“Family members have stated that their support of Trump hinges on several key issues: abortion and immigration. As faithful Catholics, some in my family point to abortion as the primary issue that influences their politics. They believe that the Republican Party is pro-life and anti-abortion and that the Democrats, conversely, are not. Of course, my family’s view against abortion reflects the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), who consider abortion a ‘preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.’

“Yet, I think part of the political and cultural crisis we find ourselves in is because of this reductionist approach towards the issue of abortion. Because the Catholic bishops treat abortion as a political issue, it naturally relegates other social and political issues to the back burner. What about racism, poverty, environmental degradation, police brutality, capital punishment, immigration, education, health care, and the myriad of other issues that affect human life and dignity?

“Because of the USCCB’s singular focus on abortion, some Catholic voters look past these other issues and cling to the political propaganda that to be anti-abortion alone is sufficient to be pro-life. The migrant children separated from their families? The homeless on the street? Black victims of police brutality? They’re merely collateral damage in the Bishops’ single-issue crusade against abortion.

"The issue of immigration is one of the most glaring examples of the corrupted Christian witness that results from a myopic understanding of what it means to be pro-life. For example, I asked my family why they support the Republicans’ anti-abortion stance but not challenge the past four years’ xenophobic immigration policies. And the response is ‘illegal immigration is harmful to the people who came here legally’ and that ‘Obama also locked up children.’ It is a type of cognitive dissonance that categorizes one kind of evil and excuses another, or at least rationalizes, i.e., it is not new.”

And the culture war has many facets.

“DHS draft document: White supremacists are the greatest terror threat,” BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN, POLITICO, 4th Sep 2020.

“The threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the US, listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.

“Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year.”

Unsurprisingly, reports the Los Angeles Times, 15th Jan 2021, “Why veterans of the military and law enforcement joined the Capitol insurrection,” by Jaweed Kaleem and Kurtis Lee.

“The deadly riot in the US Capitol on 6th Jan attracted a variety of far-right extremists who shared a devotion to President Trump and his insistence on a false belief that the November election had been stolen – from him – through fraud.

“Many rioters had something else in common; they sought to upend the American government in an insurrection. And they bristled with Confederate flags, racist symbols, and conspiracy theories: They were ex-members of the military and police or actively employed by the armed services and law enforcement.”

Here’s a bit of American political history: “In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.

“The civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States. Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right.” [Wikipedia]

But let’s get back to the challenge of defining “reality” in this dynamic universe.

Consider:  “Thanks, but no thanks: Energy companies give the Arctic the cold shoulder,” The Economist, 9th Jan 2021.

“TO THE Gwich'in people, the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska is ‘the sacred place where life begins.’ It is a rare habitat that must remain protected to environmental campaigners, home to caribou, polar bears, and migratory birds from six continents. To President Donald Trump, it is a promising source of oil wealth and American energy security. To energy companies, it is a risk not worth taking.

“On 6th Jan, after four decades of fighting over whether to allow drilling in the refuge, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) held an auction for oil leases on the coastal plain. The state of Alaska and two small local companies were the only bidders.

“It is a fitting final chapter in Mr. Trump’s campaign to unleash drilling on federal lands, characterized by maximum bravura and mixed corporate impact.”

In other words, this supposed uber businessman is not the dynamic president America needs despite his claims – and how his base responded, Amen.

For example, the family has a pied-à-Terre in Manhattan, and power comes from wind and solar. And the following information came with the December electric bill:

“More than 100 million Americans now live in places committed to 100% clean energy. More than 170 cities, 13 counties, and eight states in the US have committed to transition to 100% renewable energy. In April, the Virginia Clean Economic Act's passage marked a significant milestone: 100 million Americans now live in communities committed to clean, renewable energy. That’s nearly one in three Americans—and will have the same impact as taking 66 million cars off the road!

“Renewables surpassed coal and set records in several countries. April was the first month in US history during which renewable sources generated more electricity than coal on each day of the month. This spring, the UK went an entire month without using coal power for the first time in 138 years. Additionally, renewable sources provided the majority (nearly 53%) of Germany’s energy for the first nine months of this year, with wind accounting for nearly 27% of the country's total."

Put another way, given the dynamism of the universe; industries come and go. Darwin is a more pronounced reality in the 21st century, defined by innovation and global competitiveness.

Humankind can’t stick to the past. We are witness to how the world is changing at warp speed. The problem with us Pinoys — thanks to our caste system — is we’re still in the jeepney age. And wittingly or not, we view and measure the world through our prism. Unsurprisingly, we pay a heavy price being the regional laggard.

Over the last dozen years, the life of this blog, how much have we in the chattering classes experienced shifting our paradigms? Are what we are saying Today any different from what they were twelve years ago?

Vietnam has overtaken us as an economy over that period, yet we keep whining because poverty, corruption, and tyranny continue defining us. We can’t continue to sulk because self-government says the buck stops with us, the Philippine elite class.

What else is going on?

“FOR MUCH of the past decade, the pace of innovation underwhelmed many people—especially those miserable economists. Productivity growth was lackluster, and the most popular new inventions, the smartphone and social media did not seem to help much. Their malign side-effects, such as the creation of powerful monopolies and the pollution of the public square, became painfully apparent. Promising technologies stalled, including self-driving cars, making Silicon Valley’s evangelists look naive. Security hawks warned that authoritarian China was racing past the West and some gloomy folk cautioned that the world was finally running out of useful ideas.

“Today, the dawn of technological optimism is breaking. The speed at which covid-19 vaccines came about has made scientists household names. Breakthroughs, a tech investment boom, and the adoption of digital technologies during the pandemic combine to raise hopes of a new era of progress: optimists giddily predict a ‘Roaring Twenties.’ Just as the pessimism of the 2010s was overdone—the decade saw many advances, such as in cancer treatment—so predictions of technological Utopia are overblown. But there is a realistic possibility of a new era of innovation that could lift living standards, mainly if governments help new technologies to flourish.

“In the history of capitalism, rapid technological advance has been the norm. The 18th century brought the Industrial Revolution and mechanized factories; the 19th-century railways and electricity; the 20th-century cars, planes, modern medicine, and domestic liberation thanks to washing machines. In the 1970s, though, progress—measured by overall productivity growth—slowed. Women piling into the workforce masked the economic impact, and then a burst of efficiency gains followed the adoption of personal computers in the 1990s. After 2000, though, growth flagged again.

“There are three reasons to think this ‘great stagnation’ might be ending. First is the flurry of recent discoveries with transformative potential. The success of the ‘messenger RNA’ technique behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and bespoke antibody treatments shows how science empowers medicine. Humans are increasingly able to bend biology to their will, whether to treat disease, edit genes, or grow meat in a lab. Artificial intelligence is, at last, displaying impressive progress in a range of contexts. A program created by DeepMind, part of Alphabet, has shown a remarkable ability to predict the shapes of proteins; last summer, OpenAI unveiled GPT-3, the best natural-language algorithm to date; and since October, driverless taxis have ferried the public around Phoenix, Arizona. Spectacular falls in renewable energy prices are giving governments confidence that their green investments will pay off. Even China now promises carbon neutrality by 2060.

“The second reason for optimism is the booming investment in technology. In the second and third quarters of 2020, America’s non-residential private sector spent more on computers, software, and research and development (R&D) than on buildings and industrial gear for the first time in over a decade. Governments are keen to give more cash to scientists. Having shrunk for years, public R&D spending across 24 OECD countries began to grow again in real terms in 2017. Investors’ enthusiasm for technology now extends to medical diagnostics, logistics, biotechnology, and semiconductors. Such is the market’s optimism about electric vehicles that Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, who also runs a rocket firm, is the world’s richest man.

“The third source of cheer is the rapid adoption of new technologies. It is not just that workers have taken to videoconferencing and consumers to e-commerce—significant as those advances are, for example, easing the constraints on job seeking posed by housing shortages. The pandemic has also accelerated the adoption of digital payments, telemedicine, and industrial automation. It has been a reminder that adversity often forces societies to advance. The fight against climate change and the great-power competition between America and China could spur further bold steps.” [The new era of innovation: Why a “dawn” of technological optimism is breaking, The Economist, 16th Jan 2021]

In other words, the universe is a 24/7phenomenon, yet this reality doesn’t inform worldviews. 

For example, coal is a sunset industry despite the promise of Trump to the coal miners.

“Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term ‘fake news’ echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (‘lying press’); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as ‘enemies of the people.’

“Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones.

“The Nazis thought that they could use the radio to replace the newspaper’s old pluralism; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.” [The American Abyss, by Timothy Snyder, The New York Times, 9th Jan 2021; Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of accounts of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism.]

Is the world going down the road of fascism?

“The clown ceiling: Far-right parties in Europe tend to rise—and fall,” The Economist, 9th Jan 2021. "The EU has the good luck to be opposed by mostly inept critics.

“A clown ceiling exists in EU politics, which has kept Eurosceptic parties such as VFD from gaining too much power. Such parties tend to proliferate before collapsing, often due to their risible ineptitude. The pattern repeats itself across Europe: a rapid ascent and a swift retreat. In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged in 2013. By the 2017 election, AfD was the biggest opposition party in parliament. Since then, far-right extremism and infighting have undermined it.

“In Europe, those who are most willing to lead upstart movements are often the least suited for the long-term task.

“Some parties have managed to punch a hole in the clown ceiling, but not one big enough to breakthrough. Traits that lend themselves to insurgency do not translate well into governance. The Northern League, an Italian hard-right party, took power in 2018. A year later, while riding high in the polls, Matteo Salvini, its leader, brought down his coalition to trigger an election. It backfired, and Mr. Salvini found himself back in opposition with his party’s polling dented. Sometimes, the failings are ones of character. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was in power before footage emerged of its leader lounging on a sofa offering state contracts to someone he thought was the niece of a Russian oligarch. A jester in government can swiftly look out of place.

“Fortunately for the EU, hostile parties outside it often seem just as clownish. Britain mucked up, leaving the EU so badly that no other country looks likely to copy it. In 2016 EU officials feared Britain’s exit. They worried that Britain could be a nimble, efficient state on its borders. Instead, it became a big, flailing one. Britain needed four years, three prime ministers, and two elections to fully leave the bloc. Rather than striding out a proud independent state, it waddled out of the EU with its foot in a bucket. In the eyes of some of its European peers, Brexit has turned Britain into a clown state.”

What else is moving forward and not standing still?

“General Motors Co. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra revealed that the company would offer 30 all-electric models globally by mid-decade. Forty percent of the company’s US entries will be battery electric vehicles by the end of 2025. Barra also announced an increase in GM’s financial commitment to EVs and AVs Today to $27 billion through 2025 – up from the $20 billion planned before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“’Climate change is real, and we want to be part of the solution by putting everyone in an electric vehicle,’ said Barra. ‘We are transitioning to an all-electric portfolio from a position of strength, and we’re focused on growth. We can accelerate our EV plans because we are rapidly building a competitive advantage in batteries, software, vehicle integration, manufacturing and customer experience.’” [GM website]

The universe is a 24/7phenomenon, yet this reality doesn’t inform worldviews. 

Can we Filipinos ever internalize reality?

Consider our instincts: We are parochial and insular. We value hierarchy and paternalism and rely on political patronage and oligarchy that ours is a culture of impunity.

Do we recognize a Marcos or a Duterte – or a Trump in the US’s case – isn’t the answer to this universe's dynamism. It explains why we’re the regional laggard.

But will we ever come to grips with reality? Recall Fr. George Gorospe.

Can we undo our instincts? What does the universe tell us about how to thrive in its dynamic milieu?

Recall the photosynthesis phenomenon we learned in grade school: By taking water through the roots, carbon dioxide from the air, and energy from the Sun, plants can perform photosynthesis to make glucose and oxygen.

In other words, how do we create an ecosystem that will make Juan de la Cruz traverse poverty to prosperity?

It is beyond binary thinking.

It is not about leader dependency but self-government. It is nation-building and beyond any one discipline. 

It is beyond the Constitution or “CREATE” — even the war on drugs. It is beyond Marcos or Duterte — even Trump, in the case of America.

Gising bayan!